We’re slowing things down at DCQ Daily for the time being to focus on our next print issue, slated for publication this summer. We’ll still post web-exclusive pieces, albeit more sporadically, over the next couple months. In the meantime, join the DCQ mailing list for updates (shoot an email to duncecapquarterly@gmail.com with “SUBSCRIBE” as subject — addresses sold only to our friends in Nigeria) and tell your pals to get down with us here and on Facebook. And if you’re in the Bay Area, you can now snag one of the last remaining copies of the Preview Issue at any of these fine establishments for the low, low price of a shiny silver dollar.
If you find yourself in the greater Los Angeles area tonight, drop by Red nightclub in Newport Beach as we celebrate the launch of our Preview Issue with booze, Thunderjazz courtesy of Tango & Camaro, and good times to be had by all. RSVP with us to get on the list or you’re stuck with a $20 cover, cabrones!
Who: DCQ Friends and Family
What: West Coast Launch Party Extraordinaire
When: Friday 2/26, 10pm to close
Where: RED Nightclub, 4647 MacArthur Blvd, Newport Beach
We stumbled upon this cat at Bottom of the Hill on Friday and thought he was just some dude with sturdy follicles and a “twisted” (HarHar) sense of humor.
If you’re in the greater Los Angeles area, be sure to join us on the 26th as we celebrate the launch of our Preview Issue with booze, Thunderjazz courtesy of Tango & Camaro, and good times to be had by all.
Who: DCQ Friends and Family
What: Launch Party Extraordinaire
When: Friday 2/26, 10pm to close
Where: RED Nightclub, 4647 MacArthur Blvd, Newport Beach
Thanks to all who came out to Teneleven in Alphabet City on Saturday night for a Preview Issue launch party I will hazily classify as a smashing success. Hans Blix killed it, only one party was bounced for attempted arson, and the bartender knocked $10 off my tab for forcing you all to pound PBRs. The issues themselves even arrived from our printers in Alabama (long story) in time for the festivities; sample Preview Issue page pics at bottom.
Next stop on the Published for a Fucking Party Tour: California.
Today’s SF Chronicle carries a front-page article on the San Francisco Panorama, the ambitious forthcoming publication from SF publishing house McSweeney’s. Blatantly self-serving motives aside (the piece offers Chron readers “the chance to preorder the one-time product” through its sfgate.com website and announces plans to run excerpts from the Panorama in the coming weeks), Julian Guthrie’s overview neatly profiles a literary endeavor that is anything but concise: The Panorama clocks in at 320 pages. The pub’s centerpiece comes in the form of a 112-page broadsheet newspaper comprising investigative and feature news writing as well as substantial arts, sports, food and comics sections. A 112-page magazine and a 96-page books section round out the epic.
As one would expect of an endeavor of such staggering length, McSweeney’s employed an army of creative types for the project — 150 of them, to be inexact. As the broadsheet’s name implies, the Panorama is heavy on the Bay Area/NorCal slant, and the contributors’ page is accordingly representative (Michael Chabon, Robert Hass, Peter Orner, Sean Wilsey and other notable locals, as well as “dozens of working and laid-off Bay Area journalists,” provided words). But the scope of Panorama’s literary and artistic haul is equally impressive from a national perspective: Stephen King, Chris Ware, Junot Díaz, George Saunders, Art Spiegelman and Matt Klam lend their names to the project. So breathtaking is the collection, in fact, that the Chronicle deems it deserving of a quote from one of its own editors, Ward Bushee, who asserts that “the Panorama may be the biggest, most creative and famously bylined edition of a newspaper ever printed.”
Justifiably gushing praise for the literary collaborgy aside, let’s get real: Dave Eggers’ latest altruistic project, slated for release on Dec. 8th, looks to be brilliant in many, many ways, but it will not save newspaper. The Panorama is a one-off several months in the making. It costs $16 (though Bay Area readers can cop it for just $5 the day it debuts). And the prospect of the publication realizing a profit appears dubious at best.
Wisely, McSweeney’s stops short of issuing any delusionally grandiose proclamations, instead implying that the Panorama is intended to display to the public and What Remains of Newspaper that there are alternatives to reining it in. Explains the publisher: “We think that the best chance for newspapers’ survival is to do what the internet can’t: namely, use and explore the large-paper format as thoroughly as possible. To that end, we opted for a huge and luxurious broadsheet — 15” x 22”. Then we unleashed artists and designers to show exactly how much the format can do.”
The newspaper section of the Panorama, then, should serve as an experimental blueprint — an idea, or rather, a collection of ideas, for purveyors and readers of newspaper to examine and consider. Many, if not most, major newspaper publishers and owners will dismiss the Panorama as a fantastic and fiscally nonviable exercise in “alternative” journalism. These are people whose ideas — or, more accurately, lack of such — haven’t served their publications particularly well in recent times.
Newspaper needs an overhaul if it is to survive in any physical form; the time for tender tweaks to the business model has passed. In an industry whose only recent innovative success is championed chiefly by a fossil intent on reeling back civil rights to 1952, the Panorama may serve as the radical catalyst newspaper needs to avoid a meek descent into utter irrelevance.
OK, technically I got canned yesterday, but that just don’t have the same ring to it.
Dunce Cap Quarterly is a frequently updated online magazine and blog that focuses on the arts, sports, politics, travel, pop culture obsession, the inane and the absurd — all with a penchant for self-mockery and cynicism.
The subject line is also misleading in that the launch of DCQ isn’t a capricious move: We’ve been sitting on this thing for years. It fell by the wayside due primarily to the distracting effects of alcohol, online porn and “full-time jobs.” In any event, DCQ is now officially here, eight months after we launched a bare-bones beta run (hence the presence of eight months’ worth of content). We’ll distribute a print version roughly four times a year (“Quarterly,” dummy) in our hubs of New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Follow Dunce Cap here. Feel free to smack-talk or shower praise upon us in the comments. Either way, please help get the word out by telling all your pals, subscribing to our RSS feed, and getting down with us on our Facebook page.
(photos courtesy of Angela Gail of Stereogum, because my camera’s broke)
LA’s 6th annual Fuck Yeah Fest took place yesterday in Chinatown’s Los Angeles State Historic Park. As expected, the hipsters were out in full force and the watered down cocktails were way overpriced, but on the plus side, the music roared and the park provided an open and accessible venue. Additionally, the decision to name California State Parks the beneficiaries of the event rang true with concert-goers, and most seemed fine with having paid $20-24 for tickets.
The park is long and fairly narrow, and the three stages were staggered effectively, so as not to musically contaminate one other. The fun began at 1:00pm, but keeping in line with DCQ staffers’ notorious tardiness, I didn’t show until shortly after 8:00. I scurried over the park’s grassy hills just in time to catch FYF’s first ever hip hop performer, Peanut Butter Wolf (who also maintains my favorite hip hop name of all time). The crowd seemed sparse at the stage, but the set was pure pleasure for the ADD generation, with much fun had by all via the visual scratch machine (is there an official name for this device?). I then ran to see the disappointing Fucked Up (seems they wanted to continue the event’s namesake), and mere moments later, The Dillinger Escape Plan, who felt like an enjoyable alternate universe after PB Wolf.
After forking over $8 for a “vodka & lemonade,” which was actually only lemonade I think, I found myself sequestered in the fenced off booze area. Though I could see two of the stages from the lawn in said area, I still felt that this was a limiting way to control alcohol consumption. Whatever happened to plain old wristbands? Whatev, I understand that they may have been under stricter-than-usual surveillance, being that we were in a State Historic Park.
My overall experience was grand and I’ll certainly be attending next summer, but sadly, my stay at the event this year was short lived and I missed out on these guys:
A long-overdue RIP to former Gabonese president-for-life El Hadj Omar Bongo Ondimba, who died of what may or may not have been advanced intestinal cancer in Barcelona on June 8th. In a sequence of events that should register as eerily familiar to Eazy-E fans, Papa Bongo didn’t seek international (read: first-world) medical care until early May. It clearly didn’t take.
Under Bongo, who rose to power in 1967, Gabon proved anomalously tranquil amid the ever-convulsing border lines of West Africa. As Gabon’s neighbors in the continent’s armpit slaughtered each other, Bongo built one of the world’s most prolific kleptocracies, rooted in his country’s substantial oil reserves (at present, Gabon still has more miles of pipeline than of paved road). While no conclusive estimate of his total wealth exist, Papa hung his hat in an $800 million palace and owned properties in Nice, Malibu and the like. At 4’11”, Bongo may, indeed, have boasted one the highest dollars-to-inches ratio of any current or former head of state. He apparently spent freely: The New York Times reported that Bongo shelled out $9 million to Jack “Definitely Not in Gen Pop” Abramoff in 2003 for a promised meeting with Dubya; ten months later, Papa was sipping tea and noshing on crumpets in the Oval Office.
To the littlest Big Man there ever was, happy trails (and yes, ‘death’ buys you one free post that fails to note mentions only in passing a decades-long pattern of rampant corruption, ambivalence toward human trafficking, and disregard for human rights).
…was tight as always, albeit a little light on the underage freaking. So tight, in fact, that we’re gonna let it marinate for another day or two before attempting to describe it. In the meantime, Long Island City looked nice the other day (realtors: photography skills for hire — yes, it’s true, I’m still available):
We ventured across Newtown Creek for LIC Artists’ Open Studios and, in typical DCQ fashion, set aside enough time to visit the workspaces of three of the 150-plus participating artists. Converted old factories and warehouses on barren industrial blocks slicing through a neighborhood trending residential housed the studios…
…which held, along with paint-splattered daycare centers, rotting staircases and freight elevators, some nice stuff from relative unknowns:
